The Mystery Boys
by jamesianmckenzie
Summary: There is a murder in the small town of Farmer's Point and Sam and Dean are on the case.


THE MYSTERY BOYS

It was an ordinary kind of night, or at least it seemed that way. In reality, it was a very spooky night. Owls hooted and trees rustled. It was like something out of a horror movie, albeit an especially mediocre one.

"Hey there young missy," said Officer Steve to a young lady on the sidewalk who seemed to have lost her way.

The girl turned. She had a small, round, pretty face and big eyes.

"Yes officer?" she said, a bit nervously.

"It ain't safe for a girl like you to be wandering around these street at night," the officer explained. "Why there could thieves, murderers, all kinds of things. Demons, anything."

"D-demons?" said the young lady.

"That's right," Officer Steve replied. "Legend has it that this town is haunted. By demons."

"I thought ghosts usually haunted things."

"Not this town. This one's haunted by demons."

The girl turned away from the officer for a moment and looked around, as if surveilling the area for demons herself.

"You really think there's demons out here?" she asked. "Like, for realsies?"

"Perhaps," said the officer cryptically. "What do you say I take you home in my police car, just to be safe? After all, you can trust me. I'm a police officer."

The girl appeared to think about this for a moment, though really, she was imagining a polite way to decline. "My house is only a block away. Please. I was just going for a walk because I couldn't sleep. It relaxes me. I'll be fine."

The officer shot her a vaguely suspicious look, but finally, he nodded and said, "Well, don't get in any trouble now."

"I promise officer," said said.

Finally satisfied, the officer drove away and the girl continued her leisurely stroll down the road, away from nobody and toward nothing in particular. All the talk of demons had increased her anxiety a bit, even if she didn't consciously believe in that sort of thing. Frankly, it seemed crazy to her that a grown man would even be mentioning anything like that. She'd grown out of her earlier naive, childlike propensity toward myth, and she generally went around assuming that everyone her age or older had too. But never mind. She shook her head, as if trying to get the stuck, circular thoughts loose. It was time get home.

It must have been about an hour later that she finally made her way up the outdoor stairs of her parents' house. It was chilly and she was anxious to climb under the sheets again. She snuck inside, as silently as possible, so as not to alert her parents which, she knew from experience, was incredibly easy to do.

She made her way to the bedroom, where she opted not to turn on the light - if her parents woke now, they were likely to think she had just disappeared to the bathroom, unless she gave anything to clue them in otherwise. People do not generally turn on their bedroom light if they are just returning from the bathroom.

Alarmingly, what she saw when she entered her room was what appeared to be someone, or something, already in her bed. There was a lump under the sheets as if someone was curled up underneath them. Bracing herself as if preparing to tear off a bandaid, she carefully and gently grabbed the edge of the doona cover, then, after sharply inhaling, yanked it off, revealing under the blanket a vengeful demon.

"Yaargh!" said the horned beast as it bounced up like a jack-in-the-box, grabbing her throat with its razor sharp teeth.

"Aiiee!" said the girl, desperately trying to free herself from its iron grip, to no avail.

"Now to take your soul!" said the demon, in the dramatic, carefully enunciated manner of a horror movie villain.

"Please! No!" said the girl, but the demon wasn't hearing it. He opened his jaws wide and, after summoning a bizarre kind of invisible, intrinsic effort, managed to suck the very life from her slender, delicate body, pulling it into his own self as her body flopped lifelessly to the ground.

With this, the demon looked up at the ceiling and let out the kind of evil, self-satisfied life that only a demon could make. When the girl's parents entered the room, the demon was gone, having disappeared so quickly that it must have been magic, leaving only the crumpled, lifeless corpse of their little girl lying there on the floor.

Only a couple of days later, the Winchester brothers had just arrived in the town of Farmer's Point. The taller but younger or the two, Sam, leaning again their vintage car, looked at the town, smiling the kind of smile that a person sometimes smiles. It sure was a heck of a town.

"Well," began Dean, the shorter, older and stouter of the two, "I suppose here would be a reasonable place to take a well-earned rest."

"Yes," replied a robotic Sam. "I'm looking forward to crashing on a hotel bed, sleeping beside you and you from behind, like a good brother should, then waking up in the morning well-rested, with the messy hair of someone who has tossed and turned through the night, tossing and turning their hair as they do. Perhaps then, we can visit a bar and - oh tosh, I don't know - have a few drinks, you know; drown our sorrows in a bit of golden lager. What do you say, Dean? Answer me quickly and succinctly."

"I'll answer whenever and however I please," said Dean grumpily. Frankly, it wasn't very nice for Sam to have spoken to him that way.

"Now, now. Dad wouldn't want us fighting like this. Whatever happened to that dad of ours anyway? Didn't he die or go missing something? It seems like we mention him intermittently but make no concentrated effort to try to find him."

"Listen, dad'll be fine. You know our dad. He'll be fine."

"Now seriously, Sam. What if he's dead? What if he's passed away, perhaps from a ghost or demon or shapeshifter, or perhaps from cancer or AIDS or something? Perhaps he peacefully passed away in his sleep. It's entirely possible. In fact, it's my number one fear. Going to sleep and never waking up. How are we to know whether the hooded reaper of legend will visit us on any particular night? But stop me if I'm rambling." Dean threw his cigarette at the bitumen. "Who just stands around, leaning on a car in the middle of nowhere, having these kinds of conversations anyway? What are we, a bunch of characters in a television drama?"

"It's alright," said Sam. "Let it out."

"It's a beautiful night," Dean continued. "Look at all the stars." He paused for a moment, staring blankly at the sky above him. "But maybe we ought to pack it in. I mean, we've been standing here for hours. God, it's almost two am. Where does the time go? We ought to find a hotel."

The sun rose as it set - predictably and without fanfare. The sun would have been bothered by the general indifference toward its rising, which people had become so accustomed to that they took it for granted, but the fact it, sun do not have any kind of active consciousness and thus they are unable to experience any emotions at all. One might feel compassion for the sun in regards to this, but frankly, there are too many pragmatic concerns keeping us busy for anyone to worry about this whole hypothetical thing anyway.

The boys rose in the morning, wearing their PJs and nightcaps, rubbing their eyes as they grew accustomed to waking consciousness. The sunlight beamed in through the windows, beaming aggressively into their eyes, blinding them. The heavy, brutal heat weighted down on them like a big blubbery whale sitting on their burly chests. Neither of them had expected such oppressive, terrible heat, and by the same measure, nor were they especially equipped to deal with it. Sweat leaked out of their pores like milk out of a leaky milk dispersal can, and their dehydrated heads felt heavier than Andre the Giant's head when his hair was at its longest, and therefore heaviest. The weather was, in itself, the most unpleasant surprise they had woken to since the time they had found themself roused in the fart demon's lair, and he had been farting all night.

"Who wants spaghetti?" asked a woman, as she emerged from the kitchen, young, buxom and perhaps in her late twenties.

The boys shot each other an alarmed glance as they propped themselves up in the bed, as if to say, "A lady? In this particular hotel room? Preparing spaghetti? What kind of madness is this?"

"Who are you?" asked the charming and handsome Dean as he rose from the bed.

"Maria," said the lady.

"You're name's Maria?" wondered Dean.

"No, I burned my finger and that's what we Spanish use as a kind of exclamatory remark. Maria! There I go again, burning my finger. Anyway, the name's Helga."

"Helga?" said Dean. "That's an unusual name."

"Well, to me, it is quite usual, as I have always been named that. Anyway, what's your name? Could it be Henry?"

He shook his head so vigorously that his nightcap came flying off. "No, I'm Dean, and over here's my brother Sam. We're travellers of a sort, and we decided to pull in here to Farmer's Point."

"I suppose there are worse places you could have stayed," said Helga with a smile. "Like Venice. Take one wrong step and you're submerged in water. What kind of a town is that? Anyway, would you boys like some spaghetti or not? I made it using my special blend of herbs and spices. Funnily enough, it was my brother Herb who gave me the recipe. Anyway, it's about the go cold. Let me smell it to make sure. Yes, it's definitely about to go cold."

"Alright. Serve us up a bowl," said Dean happily.

Helga took a big tangled clump of steaming spaghetti and plopped into onto the plate with a satisfying squish. "Mmm," said Helga, running her finger over the slick, brown exterior of the pungent mixture and bringing the stinky fluid to her lips, gently sucking down the gooey, heavy substance, slurping and gently masticating as the rich soup slid effortlessly down her throat.

His appetite having been sufficiently whetted by this, Dean took the bowl from the table and the fed the wormlike strands of spaghetti into his eager mouth. Emanating a variety of loud, vulgar squishing and chewing noises, he slurped down the loose, gooey food, letting big splotches of sauce smear his face and shirt. He chomped on the pale tendrils and sloshed the ground material around in his mouth, wearing it down with his jutting teeth until it took on the appearance and consistency of dog slop.

"So good," said Dean, finishing the final remnants of the morning meal with the enthusiasm of a starved Holocaust victim.

As Sam, meanwhile, also worked toward the bottom of his bowl, Helga returned and ventured, "Maybe I ought to show you boys around. After all, I know the ins and outs of this place like a homosexual does the male rectum."

"Sounds great," said Dean, ignoring this bizarre choice of metaphor.

In almost no time at all, they had taken Helga into their car and allowed her to guide them as to where to go. They had willingly, and unselfconsciously, allowed her to dictate the future of their day, and they were looking forward to where it might go.

"How long have you been living here anyway?" wondered Sam.

"Nearly my whole life," said Helga. "I spent a year in the big city, but in the end, I missed the pungent stink of molasses."

Sam arched his eyebrows suspiciously. "So where are we going?"

"I thought you might want to visit the local pastor," answered Helga. "He's a good friend of mine. But I must tell you, he recently lost a daughter. It's a very strange case. Nobody knows quite why she died."

"That is strange," said Sam, who suddenly became aware that this kind of mystery fell right into their esoteric wheelhouse. "We must talk to him about this and console him." He elbowed Dean.

"Yes!" barked Dean suddenly. "As you said, yes, that entirely. I'm utterly in agreement."

Sam continued to elbow Dean.

"Stop doing that," Dean whispered.

"Sorry," Sam whispered back.

"What are you boys whispered about back there?" asked a curious Helga.

"Nothing," replied Dean and Sam simultaneously, stiff and rigid, like David Byrne perpetually is.

"Ah, here we are now," said Helga as she turned into the lot.

The church looked as if it had been built a thousand year ago, and maybe it had. It was like something out of a pop-up book about churched. It was made of marbled red brick, and the stained glass windows showed pictures of various religious type things, like Jesus, for example. The boys climbed out of the car and now, out of the air conditioning, the overbearing hotness really weighed on them. They stumbled around, dizzy and confused with violent migraines, such was the heat.

"Boy, Sam, I think I'm gonna be sick," said Dean, before vomiting profusely.

"M-me too!" said Sam, and now he too vomiting, unloading on the church lawn the remnants of the spaghetti he had so enjoyed earlier.

"Here I go again!" said Dean, and a thick stream of green and beige chunky fluid came shooting out of his mouth, like a disgusting fountain. He was throwing up so much that it was almost hard to believe that it had all once been contained within him simultaneously.

"That's disgusting," said Sam frankly, and the repulsive image now stuck in his mind sent him vomiting once more, shooting out chunks all over everything, the excess dribbling down his chin and wetting his chalk white shirt, staining a kind of unpleasant baby-poo colour. "My thousand dollar shirt!" exclaimed Sam, so alarmed by the damage he had done that he began throwing up again.

"Here," said a helpful Helga. "Cover it with this." She threw a jacket over his shivering back. Though vaguely compelled to wear it like a rape victim, he slipped in his arms and zipped it up, hiding the shame of the stained fabric, but doing nothing to quiet his still-churning stomach and even less to take the awful, acidic taste of puke that lingered in his mouth of nose, which seemed so gross to him then that some might as well have taken a shit right on his tongue.

"Come along, now. I'll introduce you to the pastor," said Helga, making 'come on' motions with her hand. The boys shuffled along after her, draped in coats.

Inside the church, something overwhelmingly supernatural came over them. The whole place seemed to invite a feeling of ecstatic calm. Disquieted by the effect, the two of them followed pretty Helga along the pews.

Standing in the back on the hall was a still-handsome man with grey hair, perhaps in his early fifties, wearing a warm smile and traditional priest garb."

"Your majesty," said Dean.

"Pete will be fine," said the poster, laughing to himself.

"What a nice church you have here," offered Sam, which frankly was a much better attempt to break the ice than his foolhardy brother's.

"Thank you," replied the pastor, nodding appreciatively. "It's many years old and was built by slaves that belonged to George Washington himself."

"Wow, George Washington," said Sam.

Suddenly, the great, booming sound of the organ barreled down the aisles of the church. Everyone turned to see Helga sitting there at the instrument, playing the beginning of a strange, haunting tune that quickly revealed itself to be Are "Friends" Electric? by The Tubeway Army. Pete and the boys smiled and clapped appreciatively, now that they had recognised the melody.

"She always had a knack for reappropriating pop tunes as organ dirges," explained Pastor Pete, and the boys oohed and aahed in reply. "Anyway, what brings you guys down here"

Answered Helga, "They're travellers. They've come to stay here a few nights. They wanted to offer their condolences about... what happened."

"Yes, we heard," said Sam quickly, before Dean could say anything. "We were make so sad by the news that we simply had to come."

"Yes, it was an extraordinary loss," said the pastor, his eyes going glassy with tears. "But she's up in heaven now, playing tennis with the angels, or whatever it is they do there. May I say that I appreciate your condolences, boys. It's especially friendly coming from non-locals such as yourself."

"Do the police have any leads?" asked Sam.

"No," said the pastor sadly.

"You know," interrupted Dean, "I've actually done some work in the past as a private detective. Perhaps I can look into it."

"A private detective?" squealed an ecstatic Helga. "You boys are full of surprises. What will I learn next? That you were responsible for 9/11? Forgive me, that was a terrible example. The point is, you're full of surprises."

"Can't argue with that," said Dean, and everyone laughed.

Little did any of them know that in the church basement, scurrying around like a rat, was the same beast that took Jessica, listening intently to the conversation between the four of them as it reverberated down below.

"Who are these boys?" asked the demon in his typically rough, guttural tone. "Could they be the fabled 'Mystery Boys' of legend, going from town to town and searching for their missing father? Well, if so, I believe this may be the perfect opportunity to finally destroy them for good!" With this, the demon began laughing rapturously. The sound exploded out, a deafening cacophony of phlegm and garbled yelps. The mice fled just to be further from the horrible noise. Finally, when he was a all laughed out, he threw his cape over his horned face and disappeared in a "poof" of smoke.

Mere hours later, a tightly wound Dean surveilled the scene of the murder for any clues. He was stroking his chin, humming and hawing, doing basically everything he could to prompt his mind to come up with a reasonable conclusion.

Turning to the pastor, Sam began, "I know this might be hard for you, but would you be able to recall what happened that night?"

"Hmm," said the pastor. "My memory is quite fuzzy, so it may indeed be difficult to recall. As I remember it, my wife and I were lying in bed under, uh, how many sheets was it, darling?"

"Two or three," answered his wife.

"Yes, two or three sheets. Now, these were no ordinary sheets. They had the highest thread count of all the sheet s in the store. Tell him, honey."

"That's right," said his wife, nodding with startling force and speed.

"Right is the only word for it. Now, it was a cool night. How many degrees would you say it was? About thirty, thirty-five?"

"Yes, about thirty-five."

"Yes, now, I remember I was dreaming about an erotic meeting with a pair of nubile twins, when suddenly I awoken by the sound of my daughter screaming, as her life was taken from her! Oh, it's so horrible. So, I leapt out of the bed - fully nude, of course, as I always am when I sleep - and ran in, my morning wood bouncing around, only to see my daughter collapsed on the ground. At first, I had no idea what was happening - I thought perhaps she had fainted - but, as I reached down and felt her cold skin and the terrible truth came over me, I remember vividly hearing a terrifying laugh echo from outside up into this very room."

"What kind of laugh was it?" wondered Dean, stroking his stubbled chin. "Was it a deep laugh? Or high and shrill?"

"Oh, it was definitely a deep laugh. Extremely deep, I would say. But, please, boys, I don't think I can talk about this any longer."

"I understand," said Sam, resting a gentle hand on the pastor's shoulder, "but before we go, do you think you could answer just one last question?"

"Okay," said the pastor, gathering himself.

"When you entered the room, do you remember anything else that was unusual - another sound, perhaps, or a smell?"

"Yes," said the pastor, his eyes widening suddenly. "I remember there was a nasty smell, like something burning. But please, boys. I must ask you to leave."

"That's okay, pastor," said Sam. "We'll do everything we can to find who did this."

So, the two of them left, and once they had, the pastor turning to his wife and said, "Finally, we can blast that heavy metal music."

The pastor cranked up the volume on the stereo and out came the warm, electric sound of Motorhead's Ace of Spades. The pastor smiled and moved his eyebrows up and down. Heavy metal was his favourite kind of music.

As their Plymouth crawled along the road, Sam turned to Dean and said, "Deep booming laugh, burning smell in the air - sounds like a forest demon to me."

"I thought those only existed in television dramas," said Dean.

"So did I," replied a morose Sam, "until now."

From within the trees that lined the bitumen, the forest demon look at the car cruising by and softly growled.

The history of the Mystery Boys is long and varied, with many twists and turns and kinks in the tale. Honestly, to take it all in at once would probably give you a headache.

One day, when they were children, the two brothers were taken out by their father, who menacingly growled, "We're goin' for a hunt," offering the boys no choice in the matter.

He snuck them in out of the house in a big sack with a dollar on the sign, simply telling the matriarch of the family, "I'm takin' this money to the bank." Although the mother was initially suspicious, especially of the way the money seemed to be kicking and crying to be let out of the bag, she allowed it, and so off the boys went, to the scene of their first hunt.

It was like something out of a short story. They drove out to the desert armed with a trunk full of rock salt guns and crucifixes, all in the interest of capturing, as their father called it, a sand demon.

"Let me tell you about sand demons," their father said. "You mess with one of 'em, you'll get sand everywhere. In your pockets, your underpants, everywhere. So be careful." A young Sam self-consciously adjusted his dacks.

The boys and their grizzled father emerged from the car and started their trek on foot. Sam's knees were nervously knocking and Dean was sweating up a storm (luckily not a sandstorm), foolishly dehydrating himself. After many hours of hiking through the raging desert winds, they came across a cave.

"You been inside a cave before, boys?" asked their father.

"On a school excursion once," answered Dean.

"Sounds gay," he replied. "School's for faggots."

"Daddy said the F word!" said Sam, in absolute disbelief.

"I'll F the both of youse in a moment," said their father, and the two of them automatically moved their hands to protect their anus holes.

Suddenly, from within the cave came a roar so loud that not even Godzilla himself could have produced it. Now the boys were really trembling. Now their knees were really knocking.

"Show yourself, desert beast!" their father boomed, in the manner as Max Von Sydow in The Exorcist, his massive voice echoing off the salt-encrusted walls off the cave.

First they heard a rumbling, then suddenly, the demon emerged, revealing itself to be made entirely of sand and tiny stones, the parts of its massive body shifting and whirring like a giant machine.

"Holy fuck," said Dean. "That nigga's off the chain."

"Watch your language," their father insisted, before he was quickly whacked in the face by the demon's fist. "Hoochie mama that hurt!" he cried, before turning suddenly to Dean. "It's all up to you now. Turn on the vacuum cleaner."

Obediently, Dean switched the Hoover on and pointed the nozzle at the sand demon. "Yaargh!" the demon cried as he was sucked into the noisy machine. From inside came the impotent and angry cries: "Hey! Let me outta here!"

Dean simply switched off the vacuum while the demon uselessly kicked against the walls of the vacuum bag, struggling to get free, like so many demons had done before.

Back in the present time, Dean and Sam were on the receiving end of some startling news.

"Say that again," Sam insisted over the telephone.

"I'm tellin' you," said the pastor's wife. "My little girl, they've taken her body!"

Sam slammed down the phone without even saying goodbye, because that's what people do in fiction.

"I should have known," Sam said, turning to Dean. "That's what this demon's been looking for all along: a forest bride."

It was dark by the time they arrived at the forest, which made the whole thing significantly more frightening. It's difficult to explain exactly why, so you'll just have to take my word for it.

"Jessica!" cried Sam, as they exited the Plymouth. "Yo baby, where you at?"

The entered the forest, which was dark, humid and smelly. The were utterly cocooned by the sounds of crickets and other life buzzing and shifting around.

"Remember Helga's spaghetti?" asked Dean. "That sure was weird."

Said the forest demon suddenly, "Blergh!", as he unexpectedly appeared in front of them.

"Holy baloney!" said Sam, before he was promptly thunked on the head by the demon's green, scaled fist. Dean, meanwhile, howled fearfully before the demon whipped out a police taser and zapped him until he collapsed from being electrocuted too much.

Dean woke suddenly and found that he had been tied to a tree with rope. He struggled to get free but his arms were pinned and tightly bound. "Hoochie mama, that's tight!" he exclaimed.

"You're tellin' me," said Sam, who was pinned to the tree beside him.

"Hello boys," said Jessica, who was tied to a third tree.

"Hello," said Dean, but then, as the truth dawned on him, whipped his head back and cried, "Whaaaaaa...!?"

Sam and Dean couldn't believe their ears or eyes or basically any part of themselves. It was suddenly astonishing, but there she was - the only girl they had thought dead, sitting right in front of them, alive and everything.

"Far out," said Dean. "Colour me surprised."

"Hold on," began Jessica, "I've almost got it." Suddenly, the ropes that had bound her suddenly came free. As a kind of explanation, she took her hand from behind her back, revealing a pocket knife. "I never go anywhere without it."

As she went to cut the brothers loose, Sam turned and said to her, "but we thought you were dead."

"I suppose I was, for a while," she answered, "but then that creature brought me back to life."

Said Dean, "That was awfully considerate of him."

Continued Jessica, "So that he could have sex with me."

"Oh," replied Dean.

"Come on, we better get out of here."

The forest was a strange and terrifying place. Owls looked upon them as they passed with accusatory glares. Snakes slithered idly by, causing tremors of anxiety within Jessica and the boys.

"We've got to stop this demon once and for all," said Dean emphatically. "I can think of no particular reason to let him go on, murdering people and bringing them back to life, tying people to trees. In our modern society, that's just not the done thing. Someone needs to teach this guy a lesson - demon extermination 101. And the subject of the class title will be him. Essentially, we'll exterminate him."

Meanwhile, back in the town, the pastor and his wife were speaking to the police chief. The three of them were in the living area of the pastor's home, sipping tea and eating biscuits which the wife had brought them.

"Mmm," said the chief, as he gobbled down biscuit after biscuit. "I apologise if I seem like a glutinous pig, but I haven't eaten since this morning."

"Yes," said Pete, "I know what it is to be famished. Back when I was a student at the pastor academy, I was often without money to even buy myself a loaf of bread. But, of course, it was all worth it to become a pastor, going around, doing pastorly things, wearing my pastor badge."

"Yes, it is a nice badge," said the chief in between generous sips of tea, having now cleared the plate of biscuits. Suddenly, some words that were indecipherable to the pastor emanated from the officer's radio.

"Dean that," said the chief back into it, now turning to the pastor. "They've spotted the Winchester brothers' car," he said, then, to his radio, "do we have a location on that?"

More indeterminate fuzz and static came from the radio, nothing but a mix of "sh" and vowel sounds.

"They've got a location," said the chief. "They're parked outside the forest. We should have warned them about that place. That evil, haunted place. Come on officers. We've got a corpse to recover.

Meanwhile, at some other place entirely, the horrible, scaled forest demon, looking like a kind of down syndrome'd Swamp Thing, so long as that doesn't present any copyright issues, returned to the location where he had bound his kidnap victim, only to find nothing but sliced ropes on the ground around the tree.

"Yaargh!" said the frustrated forest demon, stomping his feet, with his hands firmly on his hips, squeezing them so tightly that, were they human hips, they would have been crushed. As it wouldn't have made sense for a creature to have the strength to so easily destroy itself, the force of his grip was, to him, akin to how a normal person's grip when standing akimbo feels to themselves.

Then, the forest demon sniffed the air, detecting the dirty aroma of sweaty, filthy humans, and, using this as the beginnings of his trail, began running in the direction of his escaped prey.

Not far away, the newly formed trio walked toward what Jessica assured them was the edge of the forest.

"So, how long have you been solving supernatural mysteries for?" wondered Jessica out of genuine curiosity.

Dean looked at her and smiled, his eyes welling up slightly as nostalgia momentarily overtook him. "About fifteen years," he said.

"Hey, that's my age," said Jessica.

Dean, suddenly nervous, discreetly threw away the condom he had brought.

"Anyway," she continued, "I'm just glad that there are people like you boys out there, willing to recue people like me. I only wish there was some way to repay you."

Dean immediately regretted throwing away that condom.

"That's alright," said Sam, perennially the more polite of the two, and the least maniacally sex crazed.

"Yaargh," said the forest demon suddenly, as he appeared, once again, in front of them, having emerged from the trees, waving his hands around in a frightening manner.

"Quickly Dean," Sam shouted, and obediently, his burly brother knocked down the demon and drew a flash from his leather jacket pocket. Pinning down the demon's arms with his knees, he splashed the alcohol from the container onto the demon's face while it vainly writhed and struggled. Sam, standing over the two of them, lit a match and said, wittily, "Only you can prevent forest fires."

He dropped the match and it landed on the demon's face, setting it immediately alight. The demon howled in pain and struggled with all the might it had to muster, but Dean, with his extraordinary strength, easily contained it until finally, the struggling stopped.

Barely an hour later, while Jessica sat in the back of a stationary ambulance, her legs hanging idly over the edge and a rape blanked over her back, a paper cup of piping hot coffee sitting untouched in her hand, the Winchester boys spoke to the pastor, who was overjoyed to see that his little girl was alive after all.

"Gee boys, I can't thank you enough," said the pastor. "This is one of the happiest days of my life, second only to the day I graduated from pastor school."

"Ah gee, it was no trouble mister," said a blushing Dean.

"Say, will you you join us for dinner? I can't think of a better thanks than a home cooked meal," said the pastor.

Dean, although tempted by the offer, shook his head. "I'm afraid my brother and I have to go and apparently look for our father, but actually solve episodic mysteries. I'm glad to have met you, pastor."

"Likewise," Pete replied, shaking the hands of Dean and Sam with a glassy-eyed look that suggested he was on the verge of tears, the kind of look that reflects a grim determination to not express emotion.

It this was an episode of a television show, you would have seem the Plymouth screaming down the road while rock music played, essentially a kind of symbolic shorthand for the way they are leaving the story behind and moving on to another, giving the audience the kind of narrative closure they need, but of course, it was nothing but a work of prose fiction, so it never happened at all.


End file.
